Quanta Plus has undergone quite a few fixes as well (it's included in this release, in case you hadn't noticed). If you like Quanta, help them out cause they're looking for donations to help pay the developers.

Thanks for mentioning it. :-) Maybe we have the longest changelog entry, as I always write down the important changes made to Quanta, and it's easy to provide it to the public.
For those running KDE 3.0.x: Quanta Plus 3.1.1 will be released also for you on our site.

Yes! And most notably: Syntax colouring does work well now,
no randomly coloured characters anymore. Thanks for the
nice work. Finally, Quanta has become usable for me and
my co-workers and we have switched over from Kate. Still on my wishlist:

- Bugfree saving of the tree views' docking state.
- Separate syntax colouring for php opening and closing tags
- A file / folder browser which can be opened / closed again by pressing a key
(like in Homesite) and _separate_ folders and files like in Konq.
- better syntax-colouring support for mixed documents (HTML + PHP + JavaScript)

Yes. I noticed that too. They haven't mirrored though and ftp.kde.org got overloaded as soon as the announce on the dot. Now I have kdelibs-3.1.1 merged and the rest of kde-3.1. (its working fine though) Oh well. Will have to try after a few days(??). Meanwhile a mix of kdelibs-3.1.1 and kde 3.1 should work (I hope!)

I guess you misunderstood what I was saying, but anyway, thanks for mentioning the mirrorselect tool. I tried it and it is good (though it went back to the defaults anyway)
The latest kde is mirrored now, but it wasn't back then.
Posted from konqueror 3.1.1.

I'm using Debian Woody with the KDE 3.1.1 packages. Konqi loads directories a LOT faster before.
I.e, takes just a few seconds on loading a 521 folders directory. Don't seems to be a better start-up time loading.

You really should use at least --disable-debug (and even --enable-fast-malloc=full when compiling kdelibs.) --enable-final really doesn't do much for runtime speed, only makes it compile faster on machines with much ram.

I've been following KDE from CVS, so --enable-final is the one I'm not using.

I tested arklinux 1 alpha 7 which uses a very close cvs version of 3.1.1. It also uses XFree4.3 and prelinking, while I have used neither before. konq speed was the first thing I noticed, it feels like you click and it has already opened. It is soo fast. Part of that must be prelinking though. I don't know if xfree 4.3 is any faster than 4.2.1.

"People who have to use unix desktops use xterms and bash as their file managers ...."

Very amusing, you really don't know what you are talking about, so I'll make it short.
Konqueror is all in all the best browser I ever used. For work I use Linux, and my file management is sometimes from the command line and sometimes Konqui, dependeing on what's faster for what I need. At home we only use Linux, we use it for everything, and we couldn't be happier Speak for yourself next time ...

and it rocks. Looks very stable, fast. Very nice.
kuddo's to kdepim people. I can now finaly share my addresbook with my wifes.
Been working a day with 3.1.1, and it is as solid as 3.0. I can say that I am very impressed
with svg icons and konq tabbed browsing (althoug i miss mozilla's X button next to the tabs)

kde rocks (and yes, I've been progressing with debian, actually got 3.1.1 working on debian this afternoon! Hope to convert rather soon, since debian seems to be closer to the kde releases and apt-get install simply rocks)

And hey people, check this out: Konsole is actually working this time (what, rh didn't want to disable kde with this release ?) No more ugly 20x Xterm

I was stunned as well. A few days ago I was debating whether or not to move away from RH due to their marginal support of KDE - and now here they go rolling binaries right out the gate with the release of KDE 3.1.1.

I hope this is going to become a pattern for Red Hat. I have nothing against Gnome, but Red Hat is a large and popular distribution and their support of KDE only helps their position and standing with users plus the community in general.

I hope that is not the case, but I suspect you are right. It's probably some lone gunman at Red Hat that rolled these and then got called onto the carpet by a PHB warning him not to ever try that again.

On the other hand, maybe Red Hat really is just playing nice and gave some time to an employee to roll binaries for everyone.

Thank you so much for such a wonderful environment. The number one problem about it is that going back to anything else is painful. OS X ? much too limited. XP ? hurts my eyes, and the filemanager sucks at ftp (not to mention no ssh (fish://)).

As I am (nearly) an engineer, I write all of my reports with LaTeX. I was wondering if one day Kword would in fact be able to replace it. And I think that the new improved equation editor -- capable of actually _performing_ calculations -- is making it advance towards that goal.

My questions (very humble) are :

-- will there be at some point "typesetters" on the kde-level capable of TeX-quality output ? I am thinking, even for monospace type fonts for the mails.

-- Cross-reference/index-generation for Kword ?

I know those points are not directly related to the article -- but by my book, though I have no doubt that KDE can become even better (small (or big) usability inprovement here and there, eye-candy, even more IOSlaves, perfect translations, focus-follows-mind :)) but as it is it is for me perfect. Seriously.

Perhaps the defaults could be slightly altered (see screenshot), but what, this is a stricly selfish point :)

There certainly is nothing wrong with LaTeX. LaTeX is the Tao. LaTeX is Beauty, and therefore it is Truth (sory Keats :))

But something must be said about a program wich can read MS-Word docs and make them into something that doesn't hurt the eyes :) Also, although I'll probably keep writing (La)TeX without anything else than an editor (Another fantastic feature of KDE, it can use the TeX-ispell dict ! Yay kate ! ), It would be easier to convince my partners to use kword than LaTeX... (though I have made many adepts in my class :) -- it is my own little contribution to dent the hegemony of MS-Word)

In fact I believe Koffice is the single most important subproject of KDE -- not because it is the most useful to me -- it isn't, by far -- but because getting rid of the evil that is MS-word is of paramount importance for the survival of humanity :)

You think I jest ?

A civilisation which keeps its archives, its knowledge and History in a format controled by a single, close entity, not interested in anything else than profit (which is fine by me, note -- they are a company driving for profit, after all) deserves to decade, decay and die.

Yes, I love books made out of paper (proper books, sewn, not glued, made with paper capable of withstanding Time).

You're right about the problem of hegemonic closed file formats, and in fact it's a problem bigger than MS-Word itself. Have a read of http://www.tomchance.uklinux.net/articles/darkages.shtml for a scary look at what could become of our culture and history, should open formats not be promoted, and laws be changed to allow the cracking of redundant closed formats.

What we really need is for the KOffice team to get together with AbiWord, OpenOffice and the other big FS players and agree on a set of open, XML-based formats, so they're standard between all office suites, and then the pressure will build on MS to get least use them, even if they still tack on pointless proprietary extensions.